Earlier today, Emma Donoghue, the author of the magnificent “Room,” chatted with the Book Club about her novel, writing a screenplay adaptation, and, of course, "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother." A transcript of our discussion appears below.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Greetings Outsiders (as Jack would call you all), this is Emma at home on a typically snowy day in London, Ontario.
THE NEW YORKER: And this is Macy—on yet another gray, snowy day in New York. Thank heavens we have this chat to brighten it! Jon and Ian will be joining us shortly, and we’re excited to chat with our readers as well—-Send your comments through whenever you like, and we’ll try to get as many up as we can.
QUESTION FROM CYNTHIA: Hi Emma, Thank you so much for this sensational book. It was just marvelous. And thanks for chatting with us today.
QUESTION FROM WENDY SIERA: Emma, thank you for this opportunity and for a dazzling book. Your evocation of the intimate “headspace” of a 5-year-old was so enthralling to me. Can you tell us something about your background and interests that would explain your level of skill and authenticity in writing about this? Is there an intution, an interest in psychology, a study of linguistics or a major number of 5 year olds in your life?
EMMA DONOGHUE: One five-year-old, Wendy, my son Finn, who’s now seven and has managed to read the first two pages of ROOM. I found motherhood a crash course in existentialism (what is my purpose in life, am I mistress or slave of my destiny, when the hell do I get some sleep?) and ROOM was the result.
QUESTION FROM TYLER: Hi Emma- I agree with Cynthia, thanks so much the amazing book and taking the time to chat with us!
QUESTION FROM MARIA: Hello, Emma
QUESTION FROM STEVE R.: Hi Emma! Ditto. Great book. And thanks for being here.
EMMA DONOGHUE: The excitement is all mine. I’ve already been enjoying Macy, Ian and Jon’s posts on the novel. Jon is so smart in comparing it to THE ROAD because McCarthy’s novel was one of the triggers for my writing ROOM; I wanted to see what a mother-child modern myth would look like, because his father-child one was so powerful.
THE NEW YORKER: Were there any other specific triggers for the book, other than motherhood and The Road?
EMMA DONOGHUE: Well, yes, the headlines about the release of the Fritzl family, back in April 2008. Within a few days I knew I wanted to write the story of a boy who would have only that much in common with Felix Fritzl, that he’d be five and stepping into our world for the first time.
QUESTION FROM SARAH: I loved the book, and I was creepily impressed by how you made the logistics of the room make so much sense. How did you figure all that out? Was it disturbing at all to have to be in the mind of a kidnapper?
EMMA DONOGHUE: A few other literary influences: Samuel Richardson’s CLARISSA (1747) for that moment-by-moment telling of suffering, and John Fowles’s THE COLLECTOR for the captor’s perspective.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Sarah, you’re right that it was creepy to spend so much time seeing things from Old Nick’s point of view in order to get the back story straight, even though none of the novel itself was going to be told from his point of view. The days I spent on home-design websites, at ikea.com, or researching shockproof security glass… But what was really creepy about it was that it made me realise that the author is always the Old Nick of her book: locking her characters in, deciding what resources to allot them, what’s going to happen..
QUESTION FROM EMILY: I read the galley for this book while pregnant with my first baby and it was just amazing timing- i was enthralled by what a mother could be- how creative and protective and inventive. It terrified and excited me all at once. So I was wondering—how many of the games they play and conversations they have did you draw from real life?
EMMA DONOGHUE: Oh, and another part of how I got into Old Nick’s head, Sarah, was that I asked my manly brother-in-law Jeff. I started with basic queries like ‘What truck would my psycho drive?’ and ‘what’s a two-by-four’, but pretty soon he was volunteering sicko extras like the chain-link fence built into the walls and floor, and the fact that Old Nick wouldn’t want the neighbours to smell any spicy food coming from Room.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Emily, I’m all talk: what writing ROOM taught me was that I know exactly how to be the perfect mother, but I’m not willing to do it for more than ten minutes at a time. The conversations sometimes came verbatim from me-and-Finn-at-five (such as the one in which he asks Ma whether, if he’s born again from her body, she’ll call him by the same name) but the games and crafts came from a mixture of sources, including a few books (there’s a great hippy one called PRESCHOOL ART: IT’S THE PROCESS, NOT THE PRODUCT) and a few friends who mother in a way more hands-on, full-time way than I do.
QUESTION FROM LAURA K.: Do you think the fact that people now know what the premise of the book is changing how they read the opening chapters? It would be such a great (dawning) surprise if one DIDN’T know. For my few friends that still don’t know the premise I urge them to remain ignorant going in.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Ah yes, Laura, the paradox of publicity is that even as we do it, we know it’s killing off the chance of another reader happening across our book in the ideal state of innocence. I would much prefer handing ROOM to someone in the street and saying ‘Sit down and read this now’, but that’s not how the marketplace works. All I can do is argue hard with my publishers to make sure that the jacket only gives away 50% of the plot rather than 95%, and as for most reviewers, they have no qualms at all! Funny story, though: my interviewer on NPR was so scrupulous about not giving away too much that her producer had to come on the line at the end of the pre-recorded piece to point out that neither of us had mentioned that the room was even locked…
THE NEW YORKER: Emma, I have to ask: does your son watch Dora the Explorer? And if so, do you like Dora the explorer?
EMMA DONOGHUE: Argh! I heartily approve of Dora, and I would recommend the show, the books, etc, to anyone who has a child under six. My three-year-old reveres here and my son, at seven, claims she’s boring but still sings along and shouts out ‘Swiper no swiping!’ But I long for the day they both grow out of Dora and I can get those wretched songs out of my head.
QUESTION FROM IAN: Did you consider including different perspectives in the novel?
EMMA DONOGHUE: No, Ian, I didn’t. THE COLLECTOR (which I mentioned above) does such a good job of capturing the mindset of a capturer, and also that’s become a banal trope of every second crime novel: the weirdo, fetishistic watcher/stalker/kidnapper/kidnapper of women or children. So I never wanted to give Old Nick that much prominence in my novel; just as Ma does, I chose to keep him at arm’s length, not letting him set the terms of the story. And as for telling it from Ma’s point of view, I can’t imagine how to do that without the novel degenerating into a tearjerker, because at every point Ma knows all the reasons to be sad. Nor did I think any of the experts or other adults (such as Grandma) needed their own narration; I thought I could put their sense of Ma and Jack across through reported dialogue. So no, I held to my conviction that ROOM would either have the virtue of originality through being Jack’s tale, or it shouldn’t be told at all.
QUESTION FROM KATE: Hi Emma. I’m interested to hear about your process. Did you think out what Jack would say in “grown-up” speak first, and then translate it, or did you actually become Jack when you were writing?
EMMA DONOGHUE: Since you’re here, Ian, thanks so much for your fascinating post. You make a very good point about certain lines in the novel—such as ‘I’m not in Room. Am I still me?’—being unnecessary because ‘any thoughtful reader’ would come to those conclusions without being nudged. I know exactly what you mean, but I’m afraid most readers aren’t quite that ‘thoughtful’. Not that they lack intelligence but that they are busy, tired or distracted. So I’m writing for a wide range of readers, some of which won’t need those little nudges, and will in addition pick up on many of the texts I have Jack echo, and some of whom won’t notice the allusions and will be grateful for the nudges. I always meant this to be a book for 11-year-olds and for university professors. Actually, last night the nightmarish thought occurred to me that with electronic delivery of books becoming a norm, soon writers may be expected to provide several versions of their book, ranging from the Easy to the Complex, and buyers will choose what they’re in the mood for with the click of a button! I do hope not; writing for that wide spectrum is part of the profound fun of trying to fit the world into a novel.
QUESTION FROM JON: How did you choose the handful of books and art works that Jack and his mom were given by Old Nick?
QUESTION FROM IAN: Emma, that is an especially useful idea to think about when considering the novel, that it serves different audiences. That’s something that I suppose is inherent in almost all books, but that I hadn’t really thought about before.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Kate, great question: no, I didn’t draft Jack’s thoughts in Adult and then translate them into Kid, because no adult would have those thoughts in that order. Writing in Kid from the start (once I had figured out exactly what peculiar dialect of age-five-but-hyper-educated Kid he would start) was what helped me invent not only what thoughts would occur to Jack but what their zigzag sequence of association would be. I wanted the novel to be highly patterned but in a naive manner, so that, for instance, Jack’s cult of numbers (five is good, nine is bad) would link to the ‘magic numbers’ of the keycode that are keeping them locked in, and be echoed by the ‘magic numbers’ of the licence plate that allow the police to track down Old Nick.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Jon, choosing the limited array of books and art was torture! For the pictures, it had to be famous masterpieces, as they were the only ones I could imagine coming free with the oatmeal; I definitely wanted to include a Madonna and Child scene to humanise Jack’s sense of religion and set up the Jack/Ma, Jesus/Mary pattern. Then I thought Monet for the pretty and Picasso for the scary, as Jack might say. The books were a little different, as they are bought by Old Nick, but probably in supermarkets or drug stores rather than bookstores. The five for Ma are bestsellers (and I deliberately haven’t read any of them, apart from the ghastly DA VINCI CODE), some of whom have titles or premises that seemed funny in the context of ROOM, such as THE SHACK or BITTERSWEET LOVE. The books for Jack, I wanted to cover that range from boring (the Pop-Up Airport, the Dylan the Digger which is based on my particular nemesis, an eight-line book my son loved called Charlie the Crane), to the folk tradition in which he’s so steeped (the Nursery Rhymes), to a genuine classic (The Runaway Bunny, which I chose because actually it’s view of motherhood is pretty dark), to the strange masterpiece that is ALICE, which I had to have as a source-text in Jack’s head because it’s all about big and small, in and out. I figured the RUNAWAY BUNNY might be on sale alongside Easter eggs and ALICE would be cheap as it’s out of copyright.
QUESTION FROM SARAH: Hi Emma—thanks so much for coming here. I thought Room was amazing. I wondered though—Some of the later scenes of the book seem critical of the media attention on Jack and his mom, and the way they’re portrayed. Did you think about the ways in which your book turned people’s attention and curiosity back on people like the Fritzl family? And did you consider that part of the appeal of your book is that same gawking interest that you seem to criticize in Room? Interested to hear your thoughts.
EMMA DONOGHUE: I’m glad somebody’s raised this. Although my conscience is clear, in that I was not exploiting any real individual’s story in writing ROOM, of course I was aware that my novel, by commenting on such situations, would run the risk of falling into those traps of voyeurism, sensationalism and sentimentality. The period before ROOM was published was uncomfortable because all people knew about it was that it was in some sense inspired by the Fritzl case, and I couldn’t defend myself against their assumptions about what such a novel would be, because nobody had read it yet… All that eased up on publication, once people saw what the the novel was actually doing. But to get back to your question, Sarah, when I was researching confinement cases (about half a dozen of them, not just the Fritzls) I became as fascinated by my sources (TV interviews, message boards, etc) as by the details of the cases themselves. Especially that unnerving mixture of the saccharine and the judgmental; it seems that we set up these Suffering Girls only to bludgeon them off their pedestals. So yes, I was highly aware, in writing ROOM, that there are unsavoury aspects to our interest in such cases, and I thought it was rather honester to include discussion of media representation in the novel itself than to cling to the high moral ground by merely avoiding scenes of voyeurism, for instance.
QUESTION FROM JON: You’ve had such a well-deserved success with this book. Has it been hard to let go of it and find time to move on to the next project?
EMMA DONOGHUE: More on the media: The word ‘zeitgeisty’, which I give to Ma’s awful lawyer, is a sort of private joke, because I picked it up from a publisher’s early description of ROOM. Same with Grandma’s book club, some of whose members wax sentimental about the peace and quiet of staying in a Zen monastery; I was anticipating that some readers might misread ROOM itself as a hymn to homeschooling.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Jon, I’m finding that success is way more time-consuming than failure ever was. (‘Problems, problems!’ my friends say, rolling their eyes.) So there’s no question of ‘letting go’ of ROOM yet, as I have to talk about it on a daily basis. Luckily I’ve always worked on projects in an overlapping or parallel way. So yes, I’m onto the next novel (1870s San Francisco), and have plans underway for plays, and a screenplay of ROOM, so ROOM the novel is just one child among many who demand my attention, if the loudest at the moment.
THE NEW YORKER: Emma, many readers are have sent through questions to the effect of: Do you have any thoughts on the hysteria surrounding “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother”?
EMMA DONOGHUE: Ah yes, I thought the Tiger Mother would probably come up! I’ve only had the time to read an interview with her so far. I’m more of the Two-Toed Sloth kind of mother; once his fifteen minutes of homework is done, I let my son loll around on piles of comics with plates of bread and jam. But seriously, I think what all the puzzling over parenthood I had to do to write ROOM taught me is that children can thrive in a remarkable range of situations. In huts on stilts, in a kibutz, under the tutelage of a Tiger mother, wherever… if they’re getting love and attention from somebody, they’ll be OK; they’re adaptable enough to cope and once they grow up they’ll do it their own way, anyway. Besides, it would be ironic if I laid down any rules of parenting, myself, given that ours is a two-mother household which would strike a large proportion of the world as just as freakish as the set-up in Room.
QUESTION FROM KATE: We were actually discussing who would be cast in a movie of “Room” just the other day. Do you have an idea of who you’d like to play Ma and Old Nick, should the movie be made?
EMMA DONOGHUE: Don’t know about you guys, but I’m having so much fun that the Turkey Pot Pie in my lap has gone stone cold…
EMMA DONOGHUE: Re: ROOM the movie, which I very much hope will happen, I do indeed have very specific fantasies about who should play whom, but I’m not going to name names as it would be rude for the actors who finally get cast to learn that they were not my first choice!
THE NEW YORKER: Everyone’s having an inordinate amount of fun. I am saving all the most adoring comments for the very end. So, readers, queue them up now!
QUESTION FROM SAM: A screenplay of “Room!” That’s exciting. I tried to picture it as a movie when I finished the book. In my version, it opens with Jack talking with the psychologist, and then the bits inside Room are flashbacks told in his voice…although that set-up would sacrifice the initial suspense of not knowing if they escape. Have you gotten far into the process yet, and figured out how to preserve Jack’s voice in movie form?
EMMA DONOGHUE: Yes, Sam, I think sometimes the way to preserve the magic of a book is to throw it away—meaning, not to cling to the way a book does its magic (in this case, the first-person voice) but to find a cinematic equivalent.
THE NEW YORKER: Ok, I’m afraid we’re out of time. Thank you to everyone who participated! And thank you especially, Emma, for joining us and for writing such a wonderful book.
THE NEW YORKER: Adoring comments coming now!
EMMA DONOGHUE: Thanks so much to all of you, especially for the gift of your thoughtful readings.
QUESTION FROM MARIA: I just read The Room a couple of weeks ago and found it so different from anything else I’ve ever read. Amazing characters.
QUESTION FROM JUDE: Hi Emma, I did leave a comment earlier (YorkshireLass). I thoroughly enjoyed the book. You seemed to think of everything in the book, the mother was a pillar of strength and taught absolutely everything she knew to her son. Every little detail helped him when he escaped and without this it could have not worked out so well for him. She didn’t teach him negativity or to be frightened, and was a strong lady. I was sorry for her that she had problems when she got out. It is so hard to imagine that these things actually happen. Wonderful that you could put a powerful message over.
QUESTION FROM RACHEL: I love your use of capitalization in his voice. It’s an instant window into his myopic perception of objects as living things. Egg. Wall. Wardrobe. And the egg sculpture… A pet…
QUESTION FROM EMILY-ROSE: I just finished the book last night, it was really wonderful. I was especially moved by the way Room has changed for Jack when he and Ma re-visit it in the final pages. Its a sensation I had forgotten, and you re-awakened it for me. Thank you.
QUESTION FROM SARAH: Those little extras made such a difference. They added to the haunting feeling of total entrapment I felt along with the characters. And the idea of the author being the Old Nick is a really interesting way of looking at it. The author is obviously in control of the characters, who we feel live and breathe, but then in control of the readers, as well.
EMMA DONOGHUE: Re: capitalization, just be grateful I didn’t use phonetic spelling!
QUESTION FROM STEVE R.: Thank you Emma!
QUESTION FROM EMILYH: Thank you! Bye, Emma.
THE NEW YORKER: Have a great afternoon, everyone, and thank you again.
